The UK University of Huddersfield’s Applied Psychoacoustics Lab (APL) has developed new audio software aimed at delivering a ‘more natural and spacious stereo sound to headphone listening’.
APL DuoPan is built on Professor Hyunkook Lee’s advanced psychoacoustic model of time/amplitude panning and spectral shaping. It is a psychoacoustic panner designed to bring natural spatial width and depth to sound engineers’ mixes and, while optimised for headphone listening, also to translate well to loudspeakers.
Professor Lee, who heads up the APL, and his former PhD student and now colleague, Dr Dale Johnson, along with the APL team, have developed DuoPan to give an entirely new way to sculpt and correct stereo images.
It is well recognised that conventional panning can sound unnatural on headphones, with images appearing inside the head and making it difficult to achieve smooth, linear movement across the stereo field. DuoPan has been designed to solve this issue, and it provides an entirely new way to sculpt and correct stereo images. On headphones, it achieves a Binaural-like imaging, placing sounds slightly outside the head for a more natural and immersive experience. DuoPan can also correct spatial imbalance issues in stereo recordings and route its output to any pair of loudspeakers within a multichannel mix.
‘DuoPan reflects my long-standing research into how we localise sound and perceive spatial impression in audio,’ says Lee, who is also Director of the University’s Centre for Audio and Psychoacoustic Engineering. ‘I wanted to make that science accessible with a tool that simply sounds right, whether you’re mixing in stereo or immersive formats. I’m genuinely excited to see how engineers and creators will use it to bring new dimensions to their mixes.’
DuoPan is now available as a commercial plug-in product and has already received support from a number of key figures in the industry, including Mastering and Mix Engineer Bob Katz; Recording and Mixing Engineer/Producer/Songwriter Hans-Martin Buff; Immersive Recording Engineer and Producer Morten Lindberg; Mixer, Producer and Songwriter Emre Ramazanoglu; and Mixing and Mastering Engineer Aaron PhatChief Gandia.
‘DuoPan is the pan pot that I’ve been dreaming of for years,’ Katz comments. ‘Finally, a pan pot with image stability and dimensionality. That widens the sweet spot and lets us create mixes that are compatible simultaneously with both speakers and headphones.’
Hans-Martin Buff – ‘DuoPan is one of those wonderful tools that I didn’t know I needed but now don’t want to live without. Panning just became a creative tool, rather than a way to move sounds.’
DuoPan follows in the wake of APL Virtuoso, 3D audio software that virtualises stereo or immersive loudspeaker set-ups and listening rooms for headphone listening.
More: www.hud.ac.uk